The early- and mid-career academic stage is excruciatingly tough for scientists. After completing a PhD and surviving the stress of postdoctoral fellowships, those who gain some career “security” through a tenured academic position can all too easily lose track of what the end goal is.
This was the case for Andrew Barron, who is now director of Macquarie University’s Minds and Intelligences Research Centre (and co-author of this article). Following three international moves as a postdoc, he secured a faculty position at Macquarie in 2007. Barron assumed his career would then take off. Instead, he found himself overcommitted, exhausted and simply reacting to opportunities with no overall sense of direction.
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Barron credits his husband, a museum director, with turning things around: “He could see I was working harder than ever and going nowhere. He helped me develop a five-year research plan.” The plan’s impact on Barron’s well-being, productivity and performance was so stark that the university asked him to create training around research planning. The module has now been used across all faculties and disciplines at Macquarie and four other Australian universities.
Five tips for creating a research career plan
This article offers five steps for research planning from Barron and four early-/mid-career academics who have created and benefited from a five-year research plan.
1. Envision the best version of yourself
The first and most important step in making a five-year research plan is to establish a desired end point. The art is to make goals realistic but aspirational. It’s about creating a vision of the best possible version of yourself in five years’ time.
On her return from parental leave, co-author Jiao Jiao Li started planning to help juggle parenting and an academic career. Li says that ECRs “need to be sure on what you want, believe that you can get there, and know that you are deserving of it”.
For Barron, this was the most difficult step because self-limiting doubt crept in. To mitigate this, think of goals that are achievable if everything works out. To keep it real, don’t build a research plan in isolation; consider the commitments and aspirations in your personal life, too.
2. Set the right number of goals
Two to five goals are realistic for most scientists for a five-year plan. These could involve securing a research fellowship or competitive grant funding, or disseminating high-quality research outputs. To be successful with these goals, ECRs would need to build collaborative networks, work across disciplines and improve personal resilience.
For Bahareh Barenjforoush Azar, “planning is not about outputs but about reconnecting with purpose and setting the right path to my future destination. This was a critical shift for me, from chasing what was available to defining what mattered.”
3. Plan backwards to chart your path to your five-year goals
With five-year goals defined, the next step is to work out the milestones along the path to the outcomes. “Backwards planning” can help with this. “Backwards planning meant first mentally projecting myself forward five years in time and then stepping backwards through all the things I would need to do to reach that target,” says Barron. In his case, securing a competitive mid-career fellowship demanded writing and submitting an application, establishing a network of collaborators and obtaining pilot data. Each of these milestones had clear deadlines attached.
Backwards planning will allow for time management and project planning. Building in time for setbacks will help take off pressure. It’s rare to get a grant or fellowship on first try, so allow for a need for two shots in the plan.
4. Game out bifurcations in the planning path
The early- and mid-career stage can feature major events in an academic’s personal and professional life that can make five-year goals hard to resolve. If an international relocation is lurking in two years’ time, for example, how can you set up a five-year plan?
A useful way to think about this – especially if a decision has to be made – is to plan out both eventualities. What is a great outcome if the move happens? What if it doesn’t? This bifurcation exercise can help to clarify thinking about major events.
Avinash Singh used this approach to plan a grant strategy: “If I apply for Grant A and it is successful, I can begin recruiting more resources and carrying out the research at full scale. However, if it is not successful, I can continue with a smaller-scale version of the research, so that I can strengthen the proposal for another opportunity.”
5. Prioritise actions towards key milestones
The final step is to set aside time to hit this year’s milestones. Start with a simple grid with rows for months and columns for activities. Populate the commitments that are already defined and cannot be moved (such as teaching dates, examination periods, family holidays, grant deadlines and key conferences). This highlights when time is available in the year.
Then block time needed for the projects to hit the milestones (grant writing, network development, experiments and paper writing, for instance).
Accept that not everything will fit into the year. Prioritise actions for the most important milestones. That way even if compromise is needed, you are committing time where it is most impactful.
The benefits of research planning
Participants found the research-planning workshop helped them to more effectively tackle high-priority work, track their research progress and reduce their day-to-day stress levels. Before five-year research planning, Nic Surawski was getting urgent things done at the expense of strategically vital longer-term projects. “The invitation to attend Andrew’s research planning workshop in 2020 and to develop a five-year research plan was a desperately needed intervention. I would not have been awarded a mid-career research fellowship without a five-year research plan.”
We believe five-year research plans are essential for building a research career. Louis Pasteur was right: scientifically, fortune favours the prepared mind.
Andrew Barron is director of the Macquarie Minds and Intelligences Initiative at Macquarie University, Australia. Nic Surawski is an associate professor in environmental engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Jiao Jiao Li is a senior lecturer in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Avinash Singh is a senior lecturer in the School of Computer Science and the Australian AI Institute, and Bahareh Berenjforoush Azar is a lecturer in the School of Professional Practice and Leadership; all in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Technology Sydney.
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